What users should know about html

HTML (or Hyper Text Markup Language) is the most commonly used language on the internet. This language and all relatives (commonly known as SGML) use so called Tags to instruct the browser to do something and plain Text.

Lets look at a simple html page:

<html>
<body>
  <table width="100%">
    <tr>
      <td>
         this is some text
      </td>
      <td>
         and here some more
      </td>
    </tr>
  </table>
  <img src="smile.gif" alt="keep smiling">
</body>
</html>

only the lines marked in red are text, which need translating. All other informations are informations of how to display the text and are called Tags (e.g.: <tr> means start a new Table Row). A Tag usually starts with a '<' and ends with '>'.
Text which needs to be translated usually is outside of tags, with the exception of ALT text (see below)

Here is what above www page would look like:

this is some text

and here some more

From above example you might have noticed that there are many spaces in front of the texts in the html file, these spaces are ignored in the output of the browser and the texts are all aligned to the left.

Special Symbols:

as characters like '<' and '>' are reserved for html Tags there are special symbols to display them:
e.g.: < stands for '<'; ö for 'ö' ...
There are many others, but the translator doesn't have to worry about them, as the software deals with it. There is one though, which is important:

 
(forced space)
As I have mentioned above, spaces are usually ignored by the browser, if the web designer wants to force the browser to display a space, he uses the   symbol. When translating please make sure, not to omit forced spaces, as this might destroy the output.
(E.g.: <td> </td> will display an empty table cell, while <td> </td> will not display a cell at all!

ALT text:
is an exception to the rule, that translatable text is outside of html tags. If you hoover the mouse over the small picture in above example, the text 'keep smiling' should be displayed (This would work, in a normal browser. ALT text doesn't seem to be supported in Java). This text is called ALT text. When translating you will be alerted to ALT text in the information area of the translation pane.

<pre> </pre>: preformated text:
there is one other possibility to have spaces and formating in the text. This is, to enclose the text in <pre> tags. See this example:

<pre>
      this is preformated      text
   and here the second line
</pre>
      this text is not         preformated
   and the second line 

here is, what this example displays:

      this is preformated     text
   and here the second line

this text is not preformated and the second line

you see the difference immediately. In the preformated area, all leading spaces and spaces in between the words is shown. In the text, which is not enclosed in <pre> tags, all spaces and the new lines are ignored and the text of both lines in the source code is displayed in one line.
You will be alerted to preformated text in the information area of the translation pane
When translating preformated text, please make sure, to format text as similar as possible to the original.